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WP says Marijuana Legalization Makes World a Better Place

posted by azrael on Tuesday October 21 2014, @04:32AM   
from the learning-lessons dept.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Christopher Ingraham writes in the Washington Post that many countries are taking a close look at what's happening in Colorado and Washington state to learn lessons that can be applied to their own situations and so far, the news coming out of Colorado and Washington is overwhelmingly positive. Dire consequences predicted by reform opponents have failed to materialize. If anything, societal and economic indicators are moving in a positive direction post-legalization. Colorado marijuana tax revenues for fiscal year 2014-2015 are on track to surpass projections.

Lisa Sanchez, a program manager at México Unido Contra la Delincuencia, a Mexican non-profit devoted to promoting "security, legality and justice", underscored how legalization efforts in the U.S. are having powerful ripple effects across the globe: events in Colorado and Washington have "created political space for Latin American countries to have a real debate [about drug policy]". She noted that motivations for reform in Latin America are somewhat different than U.S. motivations - one main driver is a need to address the epidemic of violence on those countries that is fuelled directly by prohibitionist drug war policies. Mexico's president has given signs he's open to changes in that country's marijuana laws to help combat cartel violence. Sandeep Chawla, former deputy director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, notes that one of the main obstacles to meaningful reform is layers of entrenched drug control bureaucracies at the international and national levels - just in the U.S., think of the DEA, ONDCP and NIDA, among others - for whom a relaxation of drug control laws represents an undermining of their reason for existence: "if you create a bureaucracy to solve a particular problem, when the problem is solved that bureaucracy is out of a job".

• Re:Try this thought experiment (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 21 2014, @10:20PM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday October 21 2014, @10:20PM (#108446) Journal

  The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences. [slate.com]

  Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

  Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.

  In addition to the organized crime and bribery associated with Prohibition, add deliberate mass poisoning. Bootleggers poisoned to stretch profits, and the government poisoned to stretch a failed technocratic experiment in moral manipulation to its ultimate conclusion.

  Check out the Ken Burns doc [pbs.org] to learn more.

  Marijuana criminalization has done even more harm. The drug war will be remembered by historians as one of the greatest policy mistakes of the 20th century.

  --
  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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